BookKevin Fedarko
Summary: "Two friends, zero preparation, one dream: a 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America's most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth. A few years after quitting his job to pursue the ill-advised ambition of becoming a whitewater guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon -- a journey that, McBride promised, would be "a walk in the park." Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the tiny cluster of experts who had actually completed the crossing billed it as "the toughest hike in the world." The ensuing ordeal revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined -- and came within a hair's breadth of killing them both. They spent more than a year struggling to make their way through the all-but impenetrable reaches of the canyon's truest wilderness, a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling leges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril -- and where there is still no trail spanning the length of the country's best-known and most iconic landmark. Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets of enchantment, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, that only a handful of humans have ever seen. Members of the canyon's eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider some profoundly troublesome myths at the very center of our national parks. Even Fedarko's dying father, who had first pointed him toward the chasm more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape. And always, there was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgiving, yet suffused with magic, drenched in wonder, and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty. From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile comes the rollicking and poignant account of an epic misadventure, a singular portrait of a sublime place, and a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America's greatest natural treasure" -- Jacket flap
Contents:
Prologue
Part I : Wild country
Into the abyss
The man who walked through time
Hell with the lid off
Part II : The witchery of whitewater
The jackass chronicles
The emerald cannonball
"Kind of a crazy idea"
The real deal
Part III : You can't fix stupid
Fricking grand
A shortcut
Who are these clowns?
Happy trails
Part IV : The shakedown
Dirty business
The godfather of Grand Canyon hiking
Rock bottom
Snakebit
Part V : Rebooting
Acts of contrition
Back again, wiser?
The greater unknown
Where water comes together
Part VI : The sudden poetry of springs
The return of the hiking king
Gems
The woman in the white deerskin dress
Part VII : In the house of tumbled stones
The great thumb
The storm
Beneath the eyes of the owl
Casa de Piatra
Part VIII : Beneath the ramparts of time
The godscape
Drenched in wonder
Olo
In Sinyella's shadow
The people of the blue-green water
Part IX : Boneland and bedrock
All in
Ghosts of a former world
Smelling the barn
Badlands
Rock bottom, again
Part X : Lost and found
Hard days ahead
"The combat zone"
Evensong
Unfinished business
Pilgrims all
Epilogue
RequestLocation
Version
Call Number
Items
New Books: Duck Room
F788 .F37 2024
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